SINGAPORE: Bots accounted for 29 percent of global web traffic in the third quarter of 2025, with 89 percent of headless bot activity targeting financial services and commerce sites, according to a new threat report.
The Q3 2025 Fastly Threat Insights Report said humans comprised 71 percent of traffic, while unwanted bots made up 25 percent and wanted bots 3.56 percent — “this in fact represented trillions of requests in Q3.”
“Headless bots are targeting transaction-heavy industries. 89 percent of headless bot traffic targeted Financial Services and Commerce industries,” the report said.
In Q3 alone, “we saw billions of requests from headless bots,” the report said.
The study found that “60 percent of all AI crawler traffic is attributable to Meta, and 68% of all AI fetcher traffic is attributable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.”
It added that 4 percent of all wanted bot requests were blocked by organizations, mainly in media and entertainment and high technology sectors.
The report said shifting user behavior is reshaping online visibility. A cited study showed “80 percent of consumers now rely on AI summaries for at least 40 percent of their searches [resulting in a reduction of] traditional website clicks by up to 25 percent .”
For publishers, “AI overviews most often provide most information the user is looking for, meaning no ‘click’ through to the source site.” Only 8 percent of users clicked through to source websites, and just 1 percent clicked links within AI summaries.
Regionally, Asia-Pacific recorded 71 percent crawler and 29 percent fetcher traffic, the highest crawler share among regions.
The report analyzed traffic from July 1 to September 30, 2025, across more than 130,000 protected applications and APIs and over 6.5 trillion monthly requests. It said the findings reflect “overarching patterns in bot behavior, rather than on any individual site or service.”
